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Three Cheers for Yvonne Braithwaite Burke

It takes a certain strength of character to say, in the face of failure, that it’s no longer all right to keep on doing the same old thing. That’s all the more true when all those around you seem content to persist along the same failed course, mired in ideology or the mistakes of the past.

So kudos are in order for Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, who today is leading a rally for L.A. youths, urging them to save sex for marriage. Burke is breaking with officials from her own county health department who still insist that throwing condoms at teens is the best way to protect them — a strategy that, all these years later, has given us the current situation, where one in five California teens has a sexually transmitted disease.

The Condoms Crowd insist that they’re giving youths what they need to “protect’ themselves, since “they’re going to have sex anyway.” But this is a strategy we don’t employ for any other youth-related social ill: No one says, “To prevent deaths from stray bullets, we need to give our kids target practice and more accurate guns,” or “Kids will smoke anyway, so let’s make sure they have low-tar cigarettes.” Because the result would almost surely be more gun deaths and more lung cancer.

And the results of L.A.’s experiment with condom-based STD prevention speak for themselves. Congratulations to Burke for having the honesty, the integrity, and enough real concern for our youth to say as much.